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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

InfoQ Headlines Now Available as Alexa Flash Briefing

InfoQ released an Alexa Flash briefing that reads aloud the latest tech-news available on InfoQ.com.

Although many InfoQ readers look daily at the InfoQ website in order to stay up to date with the latest developments in technology, there are also alternative methods to reading available. The newest addition is available via installing the InfoQ headlines skill on your Alexa enabled device. This flash briefing skill gives you an update on the latest trends in software, and summarizes the content into a briefing less than two minutes in length.

The skill will soon be available in Japanese and French-speaking countries.

Smart speaker usage

Smart speaker usage in homes is increasing, especially during the holidays where the Alexa app was the most downloaded app in the app store. A question that remains is how many people will use smart speakers as their source for their daily news. In a research conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, only 18-21 percent of smart speaker owners listen daily to a newsfeed. Reuters also listed several complaints regarding news on smart speakers, of which the length of a flash briefing was a particular issue that arose. This is why InfoQ's flash briefing is short and information-rich: it keeps you up to date in less than two minutes.

Creating your own flash briefing skill

Amazon made it easy to create skills for their Alexa platform: they can live as serverless Lambda functions. Flash briefings can also be hosted as RSS feed and will be converted to speech using Amazon's text to speech engine. To create your own flash briefing skill one can follow the tutorial Amazon made, together with the tutorial on how to host your skill as a Lambda function.